Tag Archives: Google

Everyone and their dog should have an OpenID account now. Right? Well, mostly but I somehow managed to skip this revolution so while I probably have a bunch, I don’t have primary one. Since this is a pretty complex decision I decide to ask my nice Twitter followers. I get almost instantly the answer – “use myopenid.com“

That’s it. No Google queries and sifting through a number of blog posts reviewing different services. My own little crowd (?) already made a decision for me. Going with it sounds like a safe choice as I’ll have lot of support in the community and they’ve been referred by people I more or less trust with these technical decisions.

There are two important shifts that we can take from this:

For certain types of questions Google is really not appropriate anymore. It used to be suboptimal but now we don’t need it anymore. I don’t even need to spam all my IM contacts to get the answer. The same medium of Twitter applies also for Facebook streams. Depends where your “friends” are.

It’s a total upside down moment for brands when they can’t buy Google advertising anymore. It’s like the biggest nightmare that Seth Godin is talking about for a while. Passionate users and a good products coupled with a Word of Mouth effect. How do you as a company behave in such world?

I do realize that this is not strictly new as the same group effect was happening with BBS‘es, USENET and later Forums but I do think there’s something more liberating in the giant feed and ability to comment and cluster interests around it.

Next time (?) what happens when all these people learn to use FriendFeed?

We can see that while the top two/three results get most focus, tend subject in this image also decided to see if advertising was useful. Too bad they only looked at first ad, just quickly glancing at the second one.

The big question is once again – is anyone doing any serious Eye Tracking in their work, and why not?

If you’ve Googled anything today you’ve noticed that Google thinks that target page is harmful. You get these results for all the search results, even Google’s own:

While it might seem like a simple engineering bug (though it could be expensive in terms of PR and money), I predict a bigger theory of conspiracy behind it.

Anyone who’s ever read a good Science fiction novel can recall a plot line where central all powerful computer decides that it’s in best interest of human race to stay away from each other and are “enslaved” as a consequence – since it’s the best thing for their own good anyway.

Not lets take a look a this Google incident. I say that someone’s code went loose and correctly flagged whole Internet as harmful. Luckily Google doesn’t have killler robots on the loose (yet? on their way? should I panic?) so the only consequence is a bit annoying browsing.

But still .. when was the last time you’ve checked your food rations and stocked your bomb shelter with fresh water?

P.S. according to Twitter trending topics, the connected world is already slowly starting to notice it and slightly panic:

At Social Media Camp 08 I presented how Zemanta internally organizes buzz from bloggers and our work-flow. Basic idea is to use a bookmarking service, to categorize different responses, while at the same time use a collection of different tools like Google Alerts and Twitter Search to follow other mentions.

The whole setup seems obvious looking back, but it took as a few months to make it work so I wanted to share this with others that need to have some sort of way to track buzz about their company and product online.

I am aware that there are a number of different solutions for this out there, but I’m sorry that none of them worked for us. I’m always happy to talk to number of them at different conferences, but for now I guess our needs are just different from what they’re building.

It’s now more than a day since Cuil, the latest hyped Google killer launched, and we can reflect on looking at how that went.

According to TechCrunch and a number of other sources, it didn’t go too well, with their servers crashing a number of times. I’ve seen this also happen, failing to even load their most basic static pages, like general information.

What I’m wondering is why did they miss the whole social media aspect of launching a new service. They are clearly not active in this space, with their Twitter account @cuil having 22 followers but not even a single message.

Here are 5 simple things any startup can do make their presence more human and accessible:

Make us of top 5 currently most active social media services: Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and two lesser known from your field.

b) Actually link to these pages from your page

Get a strong presence with real people at GetSatisfaction, to quickly and easily answer their questions and reassure them about their problems (with extra points for actually fixing them).

Provide a human face to your “Contact us” section. Provide personal email of your community manager, with extra points for his or hers picture next to it. Shipping address is not the most important part of that page.

Have a blog (yes, this is different from News and press boring PR messages).

Be part of discussions on other pages. (TechCrunch Cuil news has 260+ comments. Not a single answer from the authors)

What’s even more interesting is the fact that Chris Brogan wrote a post, mentioning that Google’s first hit for Cuil is a story how Cuil is not a threat to Google. While the web is big, Google’s own Matt Cutts managed to find a time to comment on that post and provide their side of the story.

Why is there not a single answer from the creators on the web (besides the seemingly highly paid articles in semi-traditional media)?